The words and phrases in the Glossary are used a lot in the activity guides. For convenience, the words are coloured blue, so that if you see a blue term, you know that you can find its meaning in the Glossary.

Team English is a system developed originally by Associate Professor Maggie MacDonald from Wright State University, along with her colleague Zena Thiravithul. Maggie's son was working at a school in Thailand, and complained that it was not possible to run student-centred communication activities with classes of 40-60 students. Maggie developed Team English as a system to:

1. Motivate students through ongoing competition
2. Get students to work cooperatively, with strong students motivated to mentor weaker team-mates
3. Get students to maintain their own discipline so that student-centred activities are possible with large classes.

Team English is not an activity itself, but a system that makes other activities work better.

The Team English guide is currently being updated, so check back soon to download the new version.

Matching Relay is a high energy activity that addresses reading, listening and pronunciation skills. It simulates real life by putting both speed and accuracy pressure on students. The fastest teams get more bonus points, but teams also score points for correct matches. Students learn that teams that rush to finish first may not win because of poor accuracy, and that it is important to balance the two.

Matching Relay is an excellent source of feedback to both the teacher and student coaches, so, if time permits, run the activity twice, with Team Coaching sandwiched between.

Matching Relay can be used to practise many different language points, including phonics, vocabulary, grammar and set phrases – in fact any pairs-matching exercise can be easily converted to a Matching Relay.

Phonics 1 Vs. 2 Drilling is a very simple but powerful technique that helps students with:

• phoneme distinctions that don't exist in Thai (e.g. “van” Vs “wan”)
• phonemes that are not final consonants in Thai (e.g. “bag” Vs “back”)
• Phonics Rules (e.g. “cent” Vs “Kent”)

In 1 Vs. 2 Drilling, we also tone as a distractor. It is important for students whose L1 is a tonal language such as Thai, NOT to pay attention to tone when listening to English. So 1 Vs. 2 Drilling serves two purposes:

1. Helping students to pay attention to the phonemes that affect word meaning in English
2. Ignoring tonal variation, which does not affect word meaning in English

1 Vs. 2 Drilling needs no special equipment other than a blackboard/whiteboard.

Phonics Bingo addresses listening skills primarily, and includes Writing Practice during the set-up stage. It also contains elements of Team Coaching. Team Leaders coach their team-mates, first in writing the words, then in helping them to listen for the target words.

When most of the class can read basic CVC syllables, you can run Phonics Bingo Version 2, in which students must work individually. This provides a smooth transition from collaborative teamwork to individual responsibility.

Phonics Dictation practices both listening and writing skills of students individually.

Students must listen and write as the teacher calls out first single phonemes, then CV blends, then CVC syllables. Eventually students should be able to write down words that include consonant clusters and several syllables.

Phonics Dictation is also important for practising spelling rules, such as use of ‘ck’ after short vowels.

It is also useful for assessing your students’ progress. Data from Phonics Dictation activities will help you make decisions about how fast to progress, and which activities to prioritise in upcoming lessons.

Phonics Drilling is similar to other traditional teacher-centred techniques. However, instead of getting students to recite the spelling by rote, the teacher uses phonics to promote good pronunciation, as well as reading.

There are three types of Phonics Drilling:

• Identifying single graphemes
• blending graphemes/phonemes into syllables
• Using phonics to teach pronunciation and spelling of real vocabulary

This Activity Guide deals with graphemes and blending. Vocabulary will be covered in a separate guide.

Lucky Dip is a fun and powerful activity that promotes cooperative learning as well as phonics development. We can also say that Lucky Dip is the simplest, purest communication activity. One student says something; others must listen and react somehow to what has been said.

Phonics Lucky Dip is a special form of this activity that addresses reading, pronunciation, listening and spelling skills. By integrating these skills, students also remember vocabulary better, because they can associate a word’s spelling, pronunciation and meaning as a unified system, rather than individual elements that must each be learned by rote.

However, an important limitation to remember is that, while Lucky Dip does promote cooperative learning, team leaders tend to dominate in this activity. It is used to develop the team leaders' skills initially; then other activities are introduced that better encourage them to mentor their team-mates.

Phonics Rain is similar to Phonics Reading Challenge, but is a much higher energy activity. Also, unlike Reading Challenge, you can allot a fixed time for it – you do not need to test every student in the class.

Like Reading Challenge, scoring for Phonics Rain is graded according to the ability of the student, which encourages more advanced students to coach less advanced team-mates, rather than take all the turns for themselves. However, in Phonics Rain, the coaching aspect is much less formalised than in Reading Challenge. Students pick cards up from around the room, then, if they need help, they can seek out a more advanced team-mate before approaching the teacher.

Phonics Rain does take quite a bit of preparation initially, but you will find that it is worth the effort. Don't be afraid that you classroom seems messy in the early part of the activity; it is designed so that by the end, all of the materials are back in order.

Reading Challenge is run during a Team Coaching session to assess students' reading and pronunciation skills. The teacher challenges groups of students of the same level (with the same Team English number) to read target word activity cards from the current unit.

Reading Challenge is very efficient for several reasons:

• While the teacher is challenging one group of students, the team coaches continue to drill the rest of their team-mates, so students are kept on task
• Team coaches get instant feedback on their coaching, as their team-mates are challenged and the scores are displayed
• The weakest students get the most coaching time before they are challenged.

Reading Challenge is also helpful in assessing your students’ progress. Use data from Reading Challenges to help you make decisions about how fast to progress through the course, which activities to prioritise in upcoming units, and which team coaches need the most mentoring. Reading Challenge is rarely completed in a single lesson. Since Team Coaching is so important, and used so often, generally only 4, 8 or 12 students need be challenged in any one lesson. Every time Team Coaching is used, challenge one or more groups of students until you have worked through the entire class. Then begin again.

There are two forms of Reading Challenge – phonics and vocabulary. This Activity Guide covers the phonics version, which is used while students are still learning the basic grapheme-phoneme correspondences and how to blend them into syllables. A separate Activity Guide is provided for Vocabulary Reading Challenge, which is used when students are able to apply phonics to learning regular vocabulary.

Team Coaching is the single most important technique you can use to develop all your students! In most classes, only a small percentage of students pay attention, because teachers do not have enough time to give every student the individual attention that they need. It becomes necessary for teachers to focus on those students who are interested, and accept the fact that the rest will achieve poor results.

Using Team Coaching, every student in the class can get the individual attention they need. However, many teachers and students struggle with Team Coaching at first, because the role of the teacher is so different to what they are used to. Instead of teaching content directly to the students, the teacher’s role is to mentor the coaches – show them how to drill effectively, as well as checking that they understand the content properly themselves.

Because of this, do not expect Team Coaching to be immediately successful. It may take several lessons for you and your students to adjust to the new environment. However, it is well worth the time and effort. Once Team Coaching starts to work properly, you will find that most of the students you had given up hope for, develop better English language skills.

Just as in football, coaches and team-mates need an upcoming competition to motivate them. So Team Coaching works best when followed immediately by competitive activities, such as Reading Challenge, Matching Relay or Phonics Dictation.

Team Coaching has many forms. This guide covers Phonics Drilling and Phonics Dictation, but with a little imagination, almost any whole-class drilling technique or activity can be adapted to take advantage of the more intensive experience that Team Coaching provides to individual students.